The effect of COVID-19 confinement policies on community mobility trends in the EU

All EU Member States were affected by the coronavirus outbreak. In response, national governments implemented containment measures such as closure of schools, cancelation of public events, limit to the number of people that can meet in public and private spaces, closure of public services and facilities, change in policies around prisons to mitigate the spread of the disease, limitations to the populations living in camps and/or camp like conditions, partial and full lockdowns. These non-pharmaceutical interventions focus on reducing peoples’ mobility and social interactions. However, the causal impact of different COVID-19 confinement policies on how mobility trends have changed after the spread of the epidemic has not been studied for the EU Member States. This is crucial also for answering the question when and how the confinement measures can be relaxed, besides avoiding unpreparedness to possible new wave of cases and introduction of new measures if needed. In this report, we adopt a quasi-experimental approach to measure the impact of COVID-19 confinement policies on peoples’ presence at home and their mobility in different types of public and private places. Our empirical findings indicate that reductions in out-of-home social interactions and visits to public and private places are driven by a combination of restrictive measures introduced by Member States. Not surprisingly, the analysis suggests that partial and full lockdowns have the strongest causal impact on increasing presence at home and reducing visits to workplaces, public transport hubs, grocery, pharmacies, open public spaces, restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theatres. The impact of public services closure and schools closure is significant but of a smaller magnitude. At the COVID-19 outbreak in EU, policy measures such as large gathering bans and changes in prison policies seem to have had no significant causal impact on communities’ overall mobility trends, but may have had some impact upon social distancing behaviour. We cannot measure the “pairwise” distance between individuals via this data set and so cannot use it to measure social distancing trends in a direct sense. Interestingly, our results also show that the lockdown of people living in camps and/or camp like conditions, such as refugees and other minorities, had a statistically significant negative effect on visits to places like national parks, public beaches, marinas, dog parks, plazas, and public gardens. However, it should be noted here that this result is attributed to two countries: Greece and Malta are the only Member States that implemented this confinement policy. This is a preparatory study and when more data will become available (we utilize daily changes in mobility trends), we will update this report with better estimates. In the future, we also intend to estimate the causal effect of social interactions and presence at home on the reported cases and deaths in the EU.JRC.I.1-Monitoring, Indicators & Impact Evaluatio

The role of consumer networks in firms' multi-characteristics competition and market-share inequality

We develop a location analysis spatial model of firms' competition in multi-characteristics space, where consumers' opinions about the firms' products are distributed on multilayered networks. Firms do not compete on price but only on location upon the products' multi-characteristics space, and they aim to attract the maximum number of consumers. Boundedly rational consumers have distinct ideal points/tastes over the possible available firm locations but, crucially, they are affected by the opinions of their neighbors. Proposing a dynamic agent-based analysis on firms' location choice we characterize multi-dimensional product differentiation competition as adaptive learning by firms' managers and we argue that such a complex systems approach advances the analysis in alternative ways, beyond game-theoretic calculations.Comment: 33 pages, 5 figure

Corruption and Environmental Policy: An Alternative Perspective

We construct an overlapping generations model in which agents live through two periods; childhood and adulthood. Each agent makes choices only as an adult, based on her utility that depends on her own consumption and the human capital and environmental quality endowed to her offspring. Entering adulthood, agents choose randomly between two occupations: citizens and politicians. Citizens are the only producers of a single good and choose the proportion of their income to declare to the tax authorities. Politicians decide upon the allocation of the tax revenue between environmental protection and education activities, taking as given the rates of peculation in each activity. In this context, two self-fulfilling stable equilibria can emerge, one associated with high and another with low corruption. Corrupted politicians induce high levels of tax evasion, reducing total public funds and thus environmental protection activities. This result is in accordance with existing empirical evidence and implies that environmental policies may fail in corrupt countries where they are used as means of supporting rent seeking activities instead of protecting the environment. A higher level political authority could intervene and force the low corruption equilibrium by choosing the appropriate tax rate and, through institutional changes, the rates of peculation.Corruption, Environmental Policy

The role of networks in firms’ multi-characteristics competition and market-share inequality

We develop a location analysis spatial model of firms’ competition in multi-characteristics space, where consumers’ opinions about the firms’ products are distributed on multilayered networks. Firms do not compete on price but only on location upon the products’ multi-characteristics space, and they aim to attract the maximum number of consumers. Boundedly rational consumers have distinct ideal points/tastes over the possible available firm locations but, crucially, they are affected by the opinions of their neighbors. Our central argument is that the consolidation of a dense underlying consumers’ opinion network is the key for the firm to enlarge its market-share. Proposing a dynamic agent-based analysis on firms’ location choice we characterize multi-dimensional product differentiation competition as adaptive learning by firms’ managers and we argue that such a complex systems approach advances the analysis in alternative ways, beyond game-theoretic calculations

The role of networks in firms’ multi-characteristics competition and market-share inequality

We develop a location analysis spatial model of firms’ competition in multi-characteristics space, where consumers’ opinions about the firms’ products are distributed on multilayered networks. Firms do not compete on price but only on location upon the products’ multi-characteristics space, and they aim to attract the maximum number of consumers. Boundedly rational consumers have distinct ideal points/tastes over the possible available firm locations but, crucially, they are affected by the opinions of their neighbors. Our central argument is that the consolidation of a dense underlying consumers’ opinion network is the key for the firm to enlarge its market-share. Proposing a dynamic agent-based analysis on firms’ location choice we characterize multi-dimensional product differentiation competition as adaptive learning by firms’ managers and we argue that such a complex systems approach advances the analysis in alternative ways, beyond game-theoretic calculations

Income inequality and the tax structure: Evidence from developed and developing countries

This paper seeks to examine the effect of income inequality on the structure of tax policies. We first use a simplified theoretical framework which allows us to formalize the testable implications of the relevant literature. Subsequently, our analysis indicates that more unequal economies rely heavier on capital relative to labor income taxation. This relationship remains robust across various alternative measures of income inequality and most importantly through alternative political regimes. In addition, our analysis places the spotlight on the potential reverse causality between income inequality and structure of the tax policies and seeks to address it by making use of the most appropriate data and techniques

The development of nations conditions the disease space

Using the economic complexity methodology on data for disease prevalence in 195 countries during the period of 1990-2016, we propose two new metrics for quantifying the relatedness between diseases, or the ‘disease space’ of countries. With these metrics, we analyze the geography of diseases and empirically investigate the effect of economic development on the health complexity of countries. We show that a higher income per capita increases the complexity of countries’ diseases. Furthermore, we build a disease-level index that links a disease to the average level of GDP per capita of the countries that have prevalent cases of the disease. With this index, we highlight the link between economic development and the complexity of diseases and illustrate, at the disease-level, how increases in income per capita are associated with more complex diseases

Economic complexity and jobs: an empirical analysis

This paper analyses the impact of economic complexity on the labour market using annual data on OECD countries for the period 1985-2008 and averaged data over the period 1990-2010 for 74 developed and developing countries with a large number of controls. We show that moving to higher levels of economic sophistication leads to less unemployment and more employment, showing that economic complexity does not induce job loss. Our findings remain robust across alternative econometric specifications. Furthermore, we place the spotlight on the link between products’ embodied knowledge (sophistication) and labour market outcomes at the micro-level. We build a product-level index that attaches a product to the average level of unemployment (or employment) in the countries that export it. With this index, we illustrate how the development of sophisticated products is associated with changes in the labour market and show that the economic sophistication of an economy captures information about the economy’s job creation and destruction

The complex-network based relation between migration and FDI in the OECD

We explore the relationship between human migration and OECD’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) using a complex systems’ approach, and we demonstrate how complex systems’ techniques can contribute new insights and advance macroeconomic empirical analysis in alternative ways. More precisely, we find a strong correlation between the migration network and the outward-FDI network, and we highlight the existence of a weaker FDI relationship in pairs of countries that are more central in the migration network. Illuminating this result, we show that inward migrants coming from third-party countries which are linked (a) either to FDI-parent country or to FDI-host country or (b) both to FDI-parent and FDI-host country are FDI marring